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The safest place for the Tories: in the wilderness
There are countless reasons for finding the election boring or depressing or both. Mine is that I believe the best thing for this country would be for the wrong side to win.
The wrong side almost certainly will win, in any case, no matter what anyone may feel and no matter how many hours exhausted candidates spend in campaign buses hurtling round the country, mouthing lies and platitudes, barging into nursery schools and making a nuisance of themselves on people’s doorsteps.
It’s exhausting and pointless even to think about it. For example, Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor, is driven from London to his Dorset constituency and back daily — a six-hour round trip in a 20-hour day — in a preposterous excess of zeal. The Liberal Democrat leader was simply too exhausted to speak coherently at his own manifesto launch.
The ridiculous thing is that it simply doesn’t matter. None of it makes any difference. New Labour will be returned, though probably with a reduced majority, the Lib Dems will carry on muddling on and the Conservatives will remain in the political wilderness.
That is exactly where I think they should be, like John the Baptist, preparing the way of the Lord, or at least the way of righteousness and the right. Because until new Labour has had a final chance in its third term to discredit itself, the country will not wake to what is wrong with the new Labour project and what might be right about the only respectable alternative.
Somehow the public doesn’t seem to know or care how new Labour has abused the constitution, corrupted the civil service, created a culture of public lying, undermined the procedures of government, incurred huge borrowing and a vast deficit, bought votes by creating nearly 1m jobs in the state sector, wasted vast sums of public money on public services without reforming them and turned a blind eye to the rape of our electoral system through corrupt postal voting.
These things are important but they are also complicated and boring. Most people still feel too rich to worry about them. And for the less rich things still aren’t bad enough for most people to care.
Not enough people feel the pinch or the rage. And until the new Labour project has discredited itself thoroughly the Conservative party will never have the political courage — or rather the political chance — to declare what it truly stands for. That’s why its position is so unconvincingly cautious and so like new Labour’s. This is a good election for the Conservatives to lose.
If by some miracle the Conservatives were to squeeze in with just enough seats for a tiny majority they would soon wish they hadn’t. Before long all the new Labour chickens will come home to roost, whoever is in power, and if it turned out to be the Conservatives they would soon find their heads besplattered with nasty messes of new Labour’s making.
They would find themselves taking the blame for the inevitable economic downturn, the ever more obvious failure of the so-called reforms in public services, the increase in real unemployment, the inevitable rise in local and general taxation, the terrible burden of bureaucracy and waste, and all because they have not dared — right now — to be more radical, because the public is not yet aware of the mess new Labour has made.
Conservatives would be blamed for all that. Conservatives would be blamed for the inevitable “cuts” — whether they really were cuts or just cuts in the rate of growth in spending. And Conservatism would be discredited, quite unjustly, for at least another political generation.
The other great advantage for the Conservatives in sitting this one out is that they will not have to face the problem of the European Union constitution. Europe is a subject that tears parties apart even when they have little else to squabble about. Like Labour, the Conservatives are genuinely divided about the future of Europe.
In losing this election they will win a wonderful bonus — the opportunity to make Europe a question of conscience, secure in the knowledge that whatever happens Labour will have to take the lead and Labour will have to take the blame. Conservatives can remain united in their untested disunity. This is the truly silver lining in the electoral cloud.
My guess (and my hope) is that France and Britain will both vote against the constitution — and comically enough, for more or less opposite reasons. My guess and my hope is that as a result the European project will have at last to be massively reformed and massively reduced to what we were first told it was, so long ago, or to even less than that.
A friendly trade alliance (of the sort originally and untruthfully suggested in this country) sounds excellent, except in so far as it might be a protectionist cartel working against the interests of poorer Europeans and of the Third World. That is no longer acceptable to genuine conservatives and free marketeers, if it is mysteriously tolerable to the self-styled internationalists of new Labour or to the eradicator of world poverty St Tony Blair.
In any case, a vote under new Labour against the European constitution would force Britons into a serious new consideration of what a united Europe might really be for. At the moment we can only be disgusted by the vote last week of European members of parliament against having their notoriously extravagant expenses properly checked — this combination of shamelessness, protectionism and greed is something we have come to associate with the European project, or worse than that, with the word Europe.
And a “no” vote under Labour could later free the Conservatives to apply a vigorous clean broom to Europe and all its unswept corners and accumulations of filth without being accused by liberals and intellectuals of xenophobia.
I am not a member of the Conservative party, although I was once briefly tempted to go into politics. However, I am a small “c” conservative and I do believe that conservatism is the only way forward — if only conservatism had a different name to avoid that apparent contradiction.
I believe that less central government, less local government, less regulation, less tax and less surveillance would be better for everyone; it would make the country richer, stronger and more free and better able to look after those in difficulties who cannot look after themselves. That would mean radical reform — a continuation of the best of the Thatcher revolution.
It would mean all the reforms that Blair has attempted and failed to achieve and many more beyond. It means a great deal more radical reform than Howard has dared to suggest in his manifesto — “creative destruction”, indeed. It means breaking up all the state monopolies, overtly not covertly, and giving taxpayers back their money to spend as they choose.
But there is hardly any point talking about this kind of radical conservatism until new Labour has proved once and for all that it is incapable of reform and incapable of honouring its multitude of confused and contradictory promises. This is an election to ignore.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, April 17, 2005
Comments:
Dear Minette,
The briefest of words to simply say- YES! Your column last Sunday, while in many ways deeply depressing, neatly sums it up. While I have never doubted the apathetic public's ability to be hoodwinked, it does surprise me a little how few political pundits have really taken this Government's record to task. Dare I say it, it is almost irrelevant what Michael Howard has to say- the focus should be on the Government's record, not the Opposition's. Where are all the enquiry minds in the press corps these days?
Regards and thank you!
Justin Gibbs
Posted by: Justin Gibbs | 19 Apr 2005 10:38:55
